What I would like to see is a sparkled, verbal, full screen application that teaches the child how that mouse works. “Hey, YOU DID IT” resounds when the child gets the task right. Or…”Not quite but close, let’s try that again”.

Tuxmath or Tuxtyping comes to mind in style and purpose. I’ve tried to contact the developers about this several times in the past two weeks but as of yet, there has been no response.

I don’t write software and I don’t have time to learn how to…not at this level. I am imploring those who have the skills to contact me and let’s talk this through…at least to see what can be done or if it can be done. Maybe it’s already out there and I missed it. If you need money to do this, I will find you a sponsor or if I can’t do that, I will take on side work to pay you what I can.

What I do know is that Linux can make a difference in the life of an Autistic child and those who care for her.

I have written a lot about using GNU/Linux in education where it is just about perfect at helping teachers, students and administrators create, find, modify and present information, the lifeblood of education. Today, I read about an engineer’s use of GNU/Linux for his work. Most of his work can be done with applications available from Debian GNU/Linux’s repository although he uses a few things running under Wine:

Virtualization technology was initially embraced by large enterprises. These large IT shops had the resources to invest in the hardware, software, consulting, and training necessary to take advantage of virtualization technology. These early adopters paid the price in terms of high costs for virtualization software and early blade servers, and also in terms of dealing with the inevitable bugs that accompany any new technology. On the other hand, these early adopters also benefited significantly from the reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) which is made possible by virtualization. They saw their capital expense decrease due to reduced hardware purchases and they saw their operating costs shrink due to reduced costs for power, cooling, and maintenance.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Linux 3.1 comes with all the components that are required for using the 3D acceleration features of various current GeForce graphics chips. The Intel graphics driver is still not using an important power saving mechanism by default. The kernel now supports the Creative Titanium HD.

Graphics Stack

David Airlie has announced new work on the xf86-video-modesetting driver, which aims to be a generic X.Org (DDX) driver that will take advantage of the generic parts of the Linux KMS (kernel mode-setting) APIs so that any GPU should be supported.

Games

I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language doesn’t feature polymorphism was especially interesting.

Desktop Environments

After a few weeks of getting grumpy with my KDE desktop at work, I thought I would investigate what other desktop environments are availbale for the version of Fedora that I am using (15 if anyone is keeping count). This particular install came with Gnome installed as well as KDE and ordinarily I would be ecstatic about this as Gnome had been my desktop of choice for a long time. However, the most recent version of Gnome has clearly been redesigned to accommodate a touch device and has lost all the “normal desktop” feel about it that a computer user would expect. Gnome used to be a complete breeze to use, have lots of good looking and useful tools (which to be fair, you can still use), and always had an air of familiarity about it. Now, you don’t get a proper “Start” style menu and have instead a page of applications under certain categories that looks more like the home screen of an iPod/Phone than a desktop. Coupled with my other general beefs with the change of interface and overall look and feel, Gnome had to go and I needed something to fill the gap. Step forward XFCE!

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

When I first got to know Qt, it was a cross platform tool. That was really the reason for me to start using Qt. It was a great cross platform tool. At the time, I was using a Tru64 based system with real X-terminals. You know, the ones where the screen really is a stupid terminal connected to the network. Tru64 meant a real Unix, as in non-Linux, setup alongside Alpha CPUs. Great for what the school wanted us to do, i.e. use Matlab and latex.

Yesterday, September 29th 2011, it was published in the Dot, the article KDE España, an inspiring first year, wich summarizes KDE Spain activity after the agreement between that organization and KDE e.V. was signed.

GNOME Desktop

Version 3.2 of the GTK+ GUI library has been released. The new version brings several enhancements and improvements, including better CSS theming support, two new widgets (GtkLockButton and GtkOverlay) a refreshed file chooser and a new family of “GtkFontChooser” widgets. The most important changes, though, are still experimental: the support for HTML5 and the Wayland display server. Programs that use GTK+ 3.2 can run as web applications in HTML5-compliant browsers as this video shows:

The internet is becoming pretty much everything. And This feature integrates Gnome to the web by providing support to access your web accounts like Gmail, hotmail natively right from your desktop. Through this feature you can access the web account’s email, calendar, chat right from your desktop after you login. This feature is made available to all distros which will run Gtk 3.0. You can use this feature in Ubuntu 11.10 from the control panel. This feature was developed by David Zeuthen. Check out the screencast and screenshot for more details.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

I’m a little late this cycle to move my laptop to the Fedora pre-release. (Note the web site doesn’t yet feature the Fedora 16 Beta — that should change next Monday around 10:00 US Eastern time.) I had tried some Live USBs along the way and they were generally looking great, but before now I hadn’t had the spare time to do the installation and test to make sure my various workflow bits were all working normally. Today I finally took the plunge.

[...]

But the login dialog itself, part of GNOME 3.2, is also really swank! With smooth animation and fading, it now feels so much more polished from the very beginning of the signon process.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Canonical has now sounded the whistle for developers to walk through its doors and begin to more easily write applications for its Ubuntu Software Centre, by officially launching a portal – developer.ubuntu.com.

The effort is taking up the “app store” model launched by Apple and followed on by the Android community.

While the Ubuntu desktop distro has always had an uphill battle for market share against Windows and Mac OS X, the developer portal to the Ubuntu app store shows the community’s leadership gets it. Third-party developers are the key to strengthening platform, and both developer.ubuntu.com as well as the app store are “Open for Business” signs.

Phones

Nokia is reportedly working on a Linux-based operating system code-named Meltemi which is aimed at low-end phones. Sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that the project was being led by Mary McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president for mobile phones. Nokia has declined to comment on the matter.

Android

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

According to a report Apple has slashed iPad orders by 25%, according to research report from JPMorgan Chase. There is no indication as to why Apple is cutting the orders of the iPad by such a huge percentage. There can be several possibilities — a) the iPad market has saturated. b) Tablets are not for everyone and Apple fans who wanted the new toy from Apple already got one and don’t see any need to upgrade to the newest one. c) Android has started to make serious dent in the iPad market. The figures of non-Apple tablets may be smaller but more and more users may be going for Android powered tablets instead of the iPad which is controlled by a China like regime.

Amazon has finally set the tablet stage on fire with the launch of $199 Android tablet against Apple excessively expensive iPad tablets. Amazon has made the right move at the right time by offering a tablet with the perfect price. This is one tablet which is going to pull the ground from under the greedy Apple.

In a Google Groups post, Nitobi software developer Brian Leroux announced that the developers behind PhoneGap have applied to contribute their open source mobile development framework to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The project has now been proposed to the Foundation for consideration and incubation as a new Apache project; however, at the time of writing, the proposal has yet to be posted.

Mozilla

SaaS

Karmasphere™, a Big Data Intelligence company, today announced it has secured $6 million in a Series B round of funding, led by new investor Presidio Ventures. Also participating in the round are existing investors Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners. Total investment in Karmasphere, since it was launched in 2010, is now $11 million.

Databases

Percona, Inc., the largest and oldest independent MySQL services vendor, today announced the release of Percona Server version 5.5.15. The new release enables users to save memory and allows them to simultaneously hold more types of data (such as large BLOB and TEXT types) in memory by removing the fixed-length limitation on the MySQL MEMORY storage engine. The new release is based on improvements designed for the world’s largest online auction company.

Project Releases

As expected, Twitter has released its Storm stream processing framework as open source. The distributed real-time computation system was originally developed by BackType, which was acquired by Twitter in July of this year.

Public Services/Government

The Innovationpark South Tyrol (TIS) in the autonomous province of Bolzano in Italy, is increasing its efforts to support innovation in local industry in using free and open source technologies. It recently made ‘Free software and open technologies’ one of its seven departments.

Open source is a topic rising in importance for public administrations in the United Kingdom. Very recent examples of public administrations turning to this type of software include city and county councils, hospitals and government departments, and politicians increasingly recognise its importance.

Programming

Distributed version control changed free software development in ways we’re only now beginning to understand. I used SVK for years from the start, and it improved the way I work. (Yes, I committed code on airplanes in 2005. I’ve forked and patched projects I don’t have commit access on. I’ve done that for six years now.)

I joined Geeknet as the Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge, and I am responsible to grow and extend our ecosystem. I am excited to bring in all my experience in the open source business and my understanding of open source communities to Sourceforge.

The Ruby development team has issued the first release candidate for version 1.9.3 of its open source programming language. According to the developers, compared to the first preview from August, the RC1 for the next stable release doesn’t include a lot of changes as it primarily focuses on fixing bugs. Provided no serious problems are found, the team say that final version of Ruby 1.9.3 should arrive within two weeks.

In answer to a direct question about whether his company was going to buy Yahoo at a forum at Stanford University in Silicon Valley this afternoon, Alibaba Chairman and CEO Jack Ma said: “We are very interested.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

Copyrights

Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore was busy on Twitter yesterday, pointing to many groups expressing support for Bill C-11, the new copyright bill. While he omitted pointing to releases from students (“anti-circumvention provisions will seriously undermine students’, teachers’ and the general public’s use of copyrighted works.”) and librarians (“legislation which does not include the right to bypass digital locks for non-infringing purposes is fundamentally flawed”), it is interesting to look at some of the organizations he did cite.

ACTA

It has been reported in global press this week that ACTA will be signed October 1 in Japan. http://goo.gl/nC0PL But that does not mean that ACTA actually goes into effect. Indeed, there seems a decent chance it will not go into effect anywhere.

ACTA Article 40 states that the “Agreement shall enter into force thirty days after the date of deposit of the sixth instrument of ratification, acceptance, or approval as between those Signatories that have deposited their respective instruments of ratification, acceptance, or approval.” Although six ratifications is a pretty low threshold for an agreement with 36 parties to the negotiation, it is far from clear that this agreement will get even that.

The Honourable Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, today signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an international agreement aimed at combatting the spread of trade in counterfeit and pirated goods. In the June 2011 Speech from the Throne, the Government of Canada committed to enforcing and defending intellectual property rights and helping balance the needs of creators and users to foster innovation- and knowledge-based prosperity.

Summary: The Novell-Microsoft agreement still helps Microsoft ‘pollute’ open stacks and tax Linux

NOVELL was obliged to give Microsoft several big gifts in exchange for money, as we have shown over the years (it is right there in the contract too). One of those gifts was the pushing of Microsoft deep into the kernel, Linux. Jos does not like to talk about it. As OpenSUSE’s community manager and a paid employee he would rather ignore all those “hard” subjects and instead talk about happy news. But the matter of fact is, just as we repeatedly showed, Microsoft used Novell to make a hook for Microsoft inside Linux and now it is using this hook to interfere with GNU/Linux domination in so-called “clouds”. Microsoft tries to shove proprietary into open after help from its slaves at Novell/SUSE, as shown by this Microsoft booster who tries to put a positive spin on it.

“Microsoft is already making a fortune from “Linux tax”, which Novell helped standardise nearly 5 years ago.”The short story is (not to entertain the booster’s own spin), some people are trying to establish an open/free stack with Linux at the centre, so Microsoft exploits the hooks Novell planted in there (as per the contract) to make this stack Microsoft- and proprietary-dependent.

Well done, Novell. Microsoft is very proud. Microsoft is already making a fortune from “Linux tax”, which Novell helped standardise nearly 5 years ago. This is the legacy of Novell — a legacy we still need to cope with before it’s eradicated for good (or Microsoft goes out of business █

Summary: Global patent system (with software patents through the central court) is further and faster approaching a reality thanks in part to the EU Presidency of the EU Council

LAST month we archived some Cablegate material that helped show how the EU Patent had been negotiated and what its outcome was under names like patent “harmonisation” or Community Patent. Justified objections kept it at bay and there were those who schemed to blackmail those who opposed.

The Future Unified Patent Litigation System in the European Union, Academy of European Law’s conference, organised in the framework of the Polish EU Presidency of the EU Council, Friday 23 September 2011

Poland’s presidency in the EU did some mean things with patents [1, 2, 3]. Something needs to be done, at the very least berating those who are responsible. According to Wikipedia “The Council meets in various formations where its composition depends on the topic discussed.” The Swedish and Czech [1, 2] presidencies (2009) were equally bad

The interests of European people are disregarded in favour of those of multinationals. █

Summary: Despite FUD from Microsoft and Mobbyists, Android is a free platform, both in terms of code and in terms of price

ADVOCACY of Linux in the mainstream often borrows a great deal from the success of Android, which in my personal view does not need much help from self-appointed “advocates”. Android is a free platform which is mostly used for spreading proprietary applications and games. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but the ultimate goal from many people’s perspective is to spread Free software, not just Linux. Platforms like Ubuntu do this a lot better.

“Just because Microsoft is extorting some companies that sell Android doesn’t make it any less free.”Ensuring the future freedom of developers is an essential goal on the path to attaining other goals. Without access to source code and permission to modify it, our generation gets left in the dark, harming both users and developers who can help them. The only ones gaining are source masters, those with exclusive access to the source defining behaviour of computers. In the case of Android, a lot of control over the phone is offered through the opening of the platform and encouragement of jailbreaking (Motorola withdrew barriers after people had complained); contrariwise, when it comes to “apps” hosted on the platform, it is a very closed and restricted world. This is not entirely the fault of Android/Google, FOSS licences, or even Linux. There are market dynamics that are hard to antagonise, especially where there are third-party developers involved. These don’t inherit their values and philosophy from Android because more often than not they target multiple platforms (usually iOS as well).

The bottom line is, while Android is an open/free platform, Android phones as a whole typically contain or can carry non-free bits. But blame should be placed not on Android developers who work for Google; In fact, if MeeGo managed to gain the market share of Android, it too would probably find itself in a similar position. As for WebOS, it was closed (the platform) all along, so Android is not the least permissive among Linux-based mobile platforms. It is rumoured that Amazon might pick WebOS up.

Another point worth making is that Android is free as in commodity, not just free to modify and redistribute. Just because Microsoft is extorting some companies that sell Android doesn’t make it any less free. It just makes those particular phones from those particular companies Microsoft-taxed appliances. Android itself is free. This is unlikely to change any time soon. But there are attempts to change perceptions, especially with Microsoft spreading FUD about being sued unless paying Microsoft for Android. It is a subject we have been covering for years. █

Summary: Criticism of inaction in the face of Microsoft patent racketeering as well as attacks on Google by proxy (through patent trolls which Microsoft admits feeding for this purpose); Microsoft labels Chrome “a virus”

Software patents are unwanted. They are clearly rejected by citizens of the United States (those who are apathetic tend to neither be involved nor even understand this subject). Those patents sure are wanted by monopolists as these patents’ existence is a clear sign that new companies are not allowed to enter the markets. The existence of software patents in the US is evidence of the fact that the country is run by monopolists/plutocrats and those who are voted into parliament (or equivalents) ignore voters who put them there; Instead, they pay attention to funders of their campaign which mostly means very wealthy corporations and their owners. The current US president, for example, is funded by Microsoft, the Ballmer family, and the Gates family (those families alone gave hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, as documented in our wiki pages). So what is the chance of a reform being passed which dissatisfies Microsoft? Or an antitrust probe into Microsoft’s abuse with patents? Not even the proposal was raised. Instead they go after the victim of Microsoft’s abuses, Google. There seem to be some attempts around Canada to see what Microsoft does with patent trolls. Nokia was virtually hijacked by Microsoft to shaft MeeGo and pass patents to a Canadian patent troll called MOSAID [1, 2], quite obviously to attack Android. Where are US regulators and EU regulators? Is this the digital Wild West, where every dirty tactic is permitted and no laws at all apply to corporations? It sure worked for banks, right?

“The current US president, for example, is funded by Microsoft, the Ballmer family, and the Gates family (those families alone gave hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, as documented in our wiki pages).”It ought to be mentioned that for at least a day the petition against software patents in the US has been inaccessible due to maintenance. Everyone who signs it must be quite sceptical about Obama’s ability to obey the request, but it is about making a statement really. If the government does not not listen, this validates claims of its blindness towards the public.

Over at Groklaw, the Lodsys troll is being tracked for its attack on Android developers. “The U.S. Patent and Trademark has acted on the first of two reexamination requests filed by Google against two of the Lodsys patents,”writes Prof. Mark Webbink, “this one on U.S. Patent No. 7,222,078. The USPTO granted [PDF] Google’s reexamination request and ordered the reexamination of claims 1-7, 10-16, 18, 22, 24, 25, 30-32, 38, 46-48, 50-53, and 69-74. Those are all of the claims for which Google requested reexamination.” Lodsys is picking patents from Microsoft’s patent troll, Intellectual Ventures. Microsoft is also amassing mobile patents of its own.

In another new post from the site, Webbink looks at Oracle’s case against Google and over at Slashdotit is pointed out that Microsoft now flags Google software as a “virus”. To quote: ‘A Google employee in the above support thread notes that Microsoft has now pushed another update to resolve the issue. “On September 30th, 2011, an incorrect detection for PWS:Win32/Zbot was identified. On September 30th, 2011, Microsoft released an update that addresses the issue. Signature versions 1.113.672.0 and higher include this update.”‘ More here.

How abusive does Microsoft have to become before the government takes action against such malice and also extortion? Many people have become rather cynical about it. Thy hardly feel like there is anyone in the Establishment looking out for their rights. █

Contents

I asked myself, “Is this even LEGAL???” I still laugh to myself that such a thought entered my head, but it was justified. My previous experience was that if it was free it had to be a bootleg or that it just wasn’t any good because I never heard of anybody using it. Nevertheless, I tried several LiveCD’s before I made the attempt to install it on my own computer, I tried out Fedora, Debian, Freespire, and ultimately, Ubuntu. Everything I read about Ubuntu told me that that was the distro of choice for Linux newcomers, so I ran with it.

I ran an Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD and surprisingly it was pretty easy to navigate through and even though it was different than the Windows I was using, a lot of its features functioned in a very familiar way. I was quite impressed and completely intrigued. Ubuntu came with my favorite internet browser, Firefox, installed by default. It had a movie player, a music player, it’s very own office suite, a bittorent client and a universal instant messenger client, right out of the box. I was one week away from the release of 9.04, so I waited and after release I downloaded and installed it to my computer. I never looked back again. I was “sold” on this free Linux.

Desktop

Canonical’s “Ubuntu Friendly” hardware-validation program, which officially debuts next month along with Ubuntu 11.10, should make life a little easier for people with computers that don’t get along so well with Linux. But what if your computer is designed from the ground up to run Linux flawlessly? I recently got a chance to speak with ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose, whose company has been shipping Linux PCs for years, about precisely that question. Here’s what she had to say.

Windows 8 machines will require what’s known as “secure boot” which is marketed as a security feature but in reality it’s primary purpose is to prevents other operating systems from being booted on the machine.

On top of taking ownership of your hardware, Microsoft has decided to take Apple’s walled garden approach to apps.

Kernel Space

The Finnish Linux User Group FLUG has awarded Jukka Ehto, the IT chief of the city of Kankaanpää with the Linux Contributor of the Year Prize. Lehto managed a large virtualization and desktop project(1) in the city, using Red Hat’s virtualization technology. In the process, he shaved off about 50% of his budget and 10% of the average time to deploy a new workstation. The prize includes a 2000 euro award.

Applications

hecking to see the structure and amount of contents on your hard drive is a pretty important capability. In fact, I just recently featured a program that does such a task for Windows. But the same program cannot be used on Linux (or other operating systems for that matter).

Minus is a free service that lets you share files easily with your friends and family. Its goal is to make file sharing as simple as possible by allowing users to upload and share their files from anywhere, be it mobile, desktop, or web. Applications for this service are available across all platforms including Linux. Furthermore, Minus also works on popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Here’s a quick review of the Linux version of the application.

So, as usual, I’ve no wrote in this space for a long time, but today, as my daughter sleeps like a baby (10 months :P), I’ve got the time for some writings..
So since my last post, I’ve acquired a new 13″ laptop to replace the good old asus eee 701, I needed a small, fast and good pc for some of my engineering work.
Just in short lines the PC is an Acer Travelmate 8371, and Linux Mint Debian Edition runs very smooth…. only one thing does not work at all, and that is the fingerprint reader, which I don’t care at all.. One of the most important things for me in laptops is battery (6 hours) and suspend (all ACPI events works out of the box. Even the intel wireless card work without problems…So I’m very pleased with this little and robust machine…

Stopmotion is a Linux program designed for creating stop-motion films. It’s available for most distributions and easily compilable for the rest. Stopmotion is simple in its design, and it allows you either to import a series of pre-taken photos or take live stop-action with a Webcam. I find the latter to be slightly easier, as you can see a ghost image of the last shot you took, making the slight changes you need easy to spot.

Games

All past and future Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle customers will have a nice, shiny copy of TRAUMA on their Humble Bundle download page. If you redeemed your bundle on Steam, TRAUMA should automatically be added to your library. (You may have to restart your Steam client for it to appear.)

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

GNOME Desktop

We all know Gnome, and similar GUIs, are there only as a fancy console multiplexer, but even so it’s useful to have widgets in your menus or dockbars to display useful data, like the release date of DNF (*). Gnome has a limited amount of applets from which you can choose, and most of them are crap or limited in their customization. You can always create your own widgets, but that’s a pain in the ass for lazy people like me. Fortunately we lazy people can now use something an order of magnitude more useful than widgets in Gnome : we can use console commands!

GNOME Shell and Unity are the two new approaches towards creating the ultimate desktop experience by GNOME Foundation and Canonical respectively. Both approaches stirred up fair amount of controversies, with personalities like Linus Torvalds going so far as to call GNOME Shell an unholy mess. But things aren’t that bad, or are they? Let’s find out.

I’ve been using KDE 4.7 for the past few months, since Gnome 3 and me really don’t get along.

I decide to take 3.2 for a spin on my Fedora 16 computer, and found it to be more of the same.

Network Manager is as incomplete as ever. Just add an advanced button, dammit! I hate having to type “nm-connection-editor” because the Network panel is half-baked for people who actually need to choose their IPs. KDE has no problems with this. The old (Good?) Gnome didn’t have a problem with this.

[...]

I’m switching back to KDE 4.7.1, and will might try again in 6 months, but as the Magic 8-ball says… “Outlook not so good”.

There hasn’t been any public activities in the -Current tree. The last update committed was in September 6 and since then, there has been a lot of changes happening in the open source world. Some people might ask “Why wouldn’t Slackware development tree gets updated lately?”

Red Hat Family

Open-source software provider Red Hat (RHT) had a quarterly earnings decline of 5%, followed by growth of 18%, 37%, 33% and 47%. Technically speaking, moving from deceleration to growth is not acceleration, but it is progress.

The Street expects earnings of 26 cents a share this quarter, which would be a 30% pop. To keep the acceleration going, Red Hat would have to beat by 4 cents. The company delivered those kind of beats in two of the past three quarters.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Jesse used Ubuntu Linux for the project. The computer he ran the monkeys on is a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHZ with 4 GB RAM running Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit. He used Hadoop, Amazon EC2 along with the world’s most popular Linux OS. He said that he created an Amazonian Map Monkeys.

In this interview Daniel Bray (Lupine) of the Ubuntu Florida LoCo Team explains how he was able to use Ubuntu instead of Microsoft to complete his college degree. In an era when almost all schools in the United States require that its students use either Microsoft or Mac based technical solutions, Bray finds a way to exercise his freedom of choice and use Free and Open Source software to complete his degree.

Jupiter is an applet designed for netbooks and laptops that you can use to switch between maximum and high performance and power saving mode, change the resolution and orientation, enable or disable the bluetooth, touchpad, WiFi and so on.

These are the days where the release team is awake for 24 hour per day. Every issue that comes up on their radar has to be evaluated and checked if it warrants re-spinning all the CD images, re-doing all the testing, or if it should go into a stable release update after the release. It’s a challenging time, but things are looking quite good. (If you ignore the problem of developers just not sleeping.)

Flavours and Variants

For some months I’ve been meaning to try out WattOS, an Ubuntu derivative that claims to do more than providing simple desktop theme changes and other high-level customizations. It seeks to provide a simple and fast desktop that’s also said to conserve more power and run better on older hardware, but is this actually the case? Here are benchmarks of WattOS R4 compared to the upstream Ubuntu 11.04 release from which it’s derived, and the numbers are quite revealing.

Phones

Android

Philips has finally made their GoGear Connect PMP available for presale. It’s an Android-based device that looks like it could still be on Froyo, but we can’t say for sure. If you need something this size (3.2 inches) and just want a cheap device to play your content on, give it a look.

While we already have plenty of upcoming Motorola smartphones on our radar, sometimes one still manages to sneak up on us, not spotted early-on via some blurrycam leaks. That’s the case with the Motorola i940, which just put in an unexpected FCC appearance, offering us a nice series of images of the handset.

Samsung begun sending out press invitations to their next “Unpacked” event, slated for October 11th. Kicking off at the same time as CTIA, this is likely the day and event where we’ll get our first look at the next version of Android – Ice Cream Sandwich.

It’s not often that we get to toss up a picture of a luxury car, but will jump at the chance as it relates to the latest rumored Motorola device. According to members of Howard Forums, the next slideout keyboarded device from Moto will be the DROID4 or 4G and is known internally as the “Maserati.” Sound familiar? I’m going to assume that this is the same device our Panda friend mentioned a few weeks back during his Nexus poem. Many of you caught his comment on it and starting looking for answers immediately.

If you think Disney is just making cartoons and not interested in mobile technology, then you might be wrong. Believe it or not, Disney actually offers quite a few phones under their Disney Mobile network and today they have added two new Android powered devices. The announced phones are known as DM011SH and DM010SH.

Dell has officially announced its third Android smartphone (after the Mini 3i / Aero and the Dell Venue). The new handset has been unveiled in Japan, where it will be available via Softbank, under the name of Dell Streak Pro 101DL.

Motorola‘s 7-inch Android tablet is set to arrive in November, while the company’s second attempt at the 10.1-inch segment will follow on in December, according to Chinese reports. Compal is responsible for the design of the smaller slate, the Commercial Times claims, while Motorola has been developing its larger XOOM-replacement in-house; neither is expected to launch running Ice Cream Sandwich, according to the tipsters.

Toshiba’s Digital Products Division (DPD), a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., today announced the addition of the Thrive™ 7” Tablet to its expanding line-up of consumer tablet devices. Featuring a brilliant hi-resolution seven-inch diagonal touch display1, the Thrive 7” Tablet offers a complete tablet experience with entertainment-optimized features in an incredibly portable design that weighs under a pound2 and fits comfortably in the palm of your hand.

We do love getting our hands on some “in the wild” shots of unknown products and this time we’re showing you the upcoming Huawei 4G tablet destined for T-Mobile. Our very own ninja guess is that we’re likely to see a formal introduction during next months CTIA event. At that point we’ll learn the

All of this, of course was ballyhooed as the next chapter for Android too early. People far and wide predicted that Android tablets would immediately challenge Apple’s iPad for market share, which isn’t the case. But the Kindle isn’t the iPad. It’s its own breed of mobile hardware device, and Amazon is making a big bet on Android with new generation Kindles such as the Fire.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire may not be an iPad killer or offer cutting-edge features, but it could prove to be a big headache for Android tablet and e-reader vendors, analysts agree. Meanwhile, others debate whether the Fire’s customized UI represents a true fork of Android, and argue over whether its cloud-oriented Silk browser is a breakthrough in mobile multimedia or an unprecedented invasion of privacy.

A prominent figure from Melbourne’s free and open source software community has complained to the Australian Labor Party that attempts to legalise the offshore processing of asylum-seekers are against party rules.

The Apache Foundation is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the full text search engine Lucene at the foundation. In 2001, Lucene entered the ASF as a sub-project of the Apache Jakarta project. Since 1997, it was available to download on Sourceforge, but in 2001 “Apache provided Lucene a home where it could build a solid community”, said Lucene’s creator and ASF Chairman Doug Cutting. Since then, said Cutting, Lucene’s usefulness to a wide range of applications and deep improvements have led to it powering “smart search and indexing for eCommerce, financial services, business intelligence, travel, social networking, libraries, publishing, government, and defense solutions.”

At a recent gathering of Mozilla folks I gave an informal talk on the early history of Mozilla. It’s unpolished, it’s low production value (one mike in a big room) and it’s clearly a talk to a live audience that was filmed. Ideally we’d do some editing, add some text for the questions that can’t be heard and maybe try to improve the oddly abrupt ending.

CMS

When it became clear eMusic’s old, custom-built content management system was becoming a drag on the company, the search was on for a replacement. WordPress offered an open source tool with a passionate developer community. The CMS switch worked out well for eMusic in the end, but it wasn’t always easy. Here are some lessons learned in the process.

Education

Schools and universities in Romania and the Republic of Moldova want to increase their use of GNU/Linux based computers and are also turning to Moodle, an open source e-learning environment, following presentations and practical demonstrations in August and September.

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The open source summer school is organised by the Computer Science faculty from the Vasile Goldis Western University in Arad. The university hosted such summer school for six or seven years, first titled ‘Linux and virtual learning environment’ and in the past three years known as “Computer science at the castle’.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

The Free Software Foundation today announced the relaunch of The Free Software Directory. For years The Free Software Directory allowed users to search and browser for software that meets The Free Software Definition, which is basically what most think of as Open Source software, but an update was needed.

PiTiVi Video Editor has just reached version 0.15 bringing in new features and fixes. This is last PiTiVi release based on traditional engine. PiTiVi 2.0 will be based on GES (GStreamer Editing Services) and will bring better performance and stability to this popular video editor.

Some of you have noticed there is something buzzing among your Dutch friends. It has to do with education, Silverlight, open standards and being obese. I’ve been asked to write about it in English so you all can get on the same page as us, and sign a petition to show your support for our campaign to make the use of open standards in education mandatory.

Health/Nutrition

The Kaiser Family Foundation just released the findings of its annual survey of businesses to determine how much the cost of employer-sponsored health coverage has gone up. There were some unexpected findings.

One was that the average cost of annual premiums for family coverage is now more than $15,000. The 9 percent increase in the cost of health insurance over last year caught many people by surprise because it represented a bigger hike in premiums than in recent years.

Defence/Police/Aggression

It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.

With Europe on the verge of a financial meltdown and many of Wall Street’s biggest banks trading at or near their 52-week lows and at a fraction of their book value — take for instance, Goldman Sachs, which is trading at about 75 percent of its book value, staring down a rare quarterly loss, cutting compensation, and firing thousands of employees — is it possible that the turmoil in the global financial markets is finally accomplishing what regulators the world over have not been willing or able to do: force these financial beasts to rein in their excessive risk-taking and act more like the dull, boring utilities we need them to be for our own safety?

A glance at the latest US employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals sharp differences in unemployment rates by educational attainment: college degree or higher: 4.3%; associate degree or some college: 8.2%; high school graduates, no college: 9.6%; and no high school diploma: 14.3%. Moreover, while the overall unemployment rate remains over 9 percent, a recent McKinsey report found that employers are having trouble filling specific positions because they could not find applicants with the right skills. The report projects that if economic conditions improve, there will be a shortage of 1.5 million workers with college degrees by 2020, but a surplus of almost 6 million of workers with no high school degree. It also projects a continuing shortage of workers with technical and health care skills not necessarily requiring a college degree.

Just about every such study points to a similar trend: for the foreseeable future, the US economy will need better educated workers with specific skill requirements. Workers without a post-secondary education face a contracting set of job opportunities. Those with higher educational attainments will be in the best position to obtain good jobs with good pay.

Darrell Issa is going postal. In the name of “Saving the Post Office,” the head of the House Government Oversight Committee is ready to knock off 200,000 jobs and put the U.S. Postal Service, founded in 1775, on the path to oblivion. President Obama’s rescue plan is only slightly better — 80,000 people might lose their jobs.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

October is fast approaching, with its annual deluge of pink ribbons and cause marketing campaigns that leverage emotions surrounding breast cancer to sell products. In past years, PRWatch has reported on questionable “pinkwashed” products like buckets of fried fast food, cringeworthy “I Heart Boobies” bracelets marketed to teenagers, and even a pink “breast cancer awareness” Smith and Wesson handgun.

Privacy

Internet/Net Neutrality

Thursday again already? We’ve created a monster, now haven’t we? Anyway, here we go with yet another Top 10 list.

You might’ve read the news that net neutrality rules are set to become law on November 20th. Of course, how “neutral” the net becomes depends on whether you’re connecting the old fashioned way, by a wire running into your house, or through the gee whiz magic of wireless service. The wireless providers get a break because evidently they aren’t charging enough already or something.